What to Remember When You Hit Bottom, Part 1

It's a victory for Satan when our feelings plummet into dark places.

He wins when hopelessness prevails. Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll teaches from the book of Lamentations. It's here we find the prophet weeping over the destruction of Jerusalem.

The parallel to our times is clear. Many of us have shed tears when we witness urban centers under siege, the insidious coronavirus striking fear, and the global economy teetering. It's no wonder many of us feel discouraged. But hope is on the horizon today as Chuck identifies what to remember when you hit bottom. I don't need to tell you these are tumultuous times.

Really, I would call them treacherous. On occasion, devastating, troublesome, worrisome. So much is out of our hands. We watch the news and we feel helpless. We feel more than that, but helpless to step in. We long for there to be, well, stillness, peace, a sense of tranquility.

But there isn't. In fact, there rarely will be in the world around us. It must be found within us. My hope for today is we gather a ray of hope from Jeremiah's words in Lamentations 3, that a touch of peace will return along with a good measure of hope and anticipation of what God may be doing around us and equally important within us. My Bible is open to Lamentations 3. I want to read a few excerpts from this fine chapter in which you will find some of your favorite verses, though again you may not have known you could put your finger on them.

You will see today where they are. I am reading from the New Living Translation. Your Bible will read in a similar way.

Follow along as we stand together for the reading of God's word. I am the one who has seen the afflictions that come from the rod of the Lord's anger. He has led me into darkness, shutting out all light. He has turned His hand against me again and again all day long. He has made my skin and flesh grow old. He has broken my bones. He has besieged me, surrounded me with anguish and distress. Verse 20. I will never forget this awful time as I grieve over my loss.

Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this. The faithful love of the Lord never ends. His mercies never cease. Great is His faithfulness. His mercies begin afresh each morning. I say to myself, The Lord is my inheritance. Therefore, I will hope in Him. And finally, verse 55.

Toward the end, verse 55. I called on your name, O Lord, from deep within the pit. You heard me when I cried. Listen to my pleading, hear my cry for help. Yes, you came when I called, and you told me, Do not fear. You're listening to Insight for Living.

To search the Scriptures with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scriptures Studies by going to insightworld.org slash studies. And now the message titled, What to Remember When You Hit Bottom. I hope that someday you can go to Switzerland. And when you do, don't miss Geneva.

That lovely city. And when you're in Geneva, take time to be with Jeremiah. He's waiting there, silently. And when you are with him, listen. Just be still, remember his life, and listen.

You'll find his statue in the square. Not far from John Calvin's church, and not that far from John Knox Auditorium, where the two of those men, get this, in the 16th century, preached like prophets. And Geneva heard truth like it had never heard before. Their words came from a pain-filled past.

They had been unappreciated and mistreated. But before Knox returned to his homeland, Scotland, to lead the Reformation, and before Calvin was gone, the two of them had plenty to say, both of them from the Scriptures. I've been there, and I've stood under the gaze of Jeremiah. He's on a pedestal, shrouded in a dark cloak.

And that timeless gaze looks right down on you. I was there, virtually alone, and I remember saying other things, but especially, thank you. I wasn't talking to a statue, I was talking to the man who lives in my mind, and in ours now, who had been through so much. Before decades, don't miss that, decades, Jeremiah held forth faithfully as a man of God, speaking to people who didn't want to hear what he had to say, and they told him so. They resented him, they rejected him, they even imprisoned him on occasion. They shoved him aside, they pushed him back, they ignored his message, he told them with warning, you're heading for devastation, our city will fall, the enemy is preparing and he's coming. They wanted nothing to do with his message, they wanted to listen to false prophets, fake preachers, and phony priests, who told him everything was going to be fine, it's fine.

Jeremiah knew better, and he told him so. I often will use Jeremiah when I speak to young men and women training for ministry at nearby Dallas Seminary. When it's my privilege to speak in the chapel, I will on occasion, not to discourage them, but to bring back some reality, remind them that not all congregations are smiling and friendly and generous. Not all the saints are kind to God's messengers.

Not all places are easy to serve. You may be called to one of those settings, learn some things from Jeremiah, learn the value of speaking the truth regardless, being ready in season and out of season, reproving and rebuking and correcting and instructing with great patience, because the time has come when there will be many who will not want to hear the truth, and they'll be looking for fads, getting their ears tickled, hearing what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. Well, Jeremiah did what he should have done, and as a result, you know by now, 586 B.C., the city of Jerusalem fell, the Babylonians laid siege, they destroyed the Temple of Solomon, they devastated the buildings, and the beautiful place of Jerusalem, the city of Zion, lay in ruins. And then they marched off the best of the city, the people who could take that 700-mile walk to Babylon, and they left the infirmed, the broken, the aging, among them Jeremiah, who walks through the rubble and sees the bloated bodies in the streets and witnesses the starving children running free without their mothers and dads. Oh, they were taken into exile. The Babylonians didn't care about those kids.

Let them starve. Jeremiah sees it all, not only before the fact, as his prophecy reveals for 51 chapters, but when it falls, chapter 52, and on into his lamentations. I call it his Journal of Woe. He's so sad. He's thinking again and again, if only they would have listened. If only they would have heeded what I had to say. But alas, look at this.

Look at this. Isn't it interesting God preserved lamentations for all of us to read so many years later, as many of our cities are going through terrible times? You've seen it.

So have I. You wonder what's next as you turn on the set. And it may be even worse than it was yesterday. We turn to lamentations and we realize that there's a limit.

There's a limit to God's patience and there's a limit to his grace. And we wonder if we're getting near. And then of all things, along with all of that comes a virus that sweeps its way, not only across Asia, but into our country and then beyond into Europe.

And now it's worldwide and it's even on the rise from time to time. And you go, what's next? Jeremiah gives us the words. I am one who's seen afflictions.

Chapter three, verse one. I've seen afflictions that come from the rod of the Lord's anger. He has led me into darkness, shutting out all light. He has turned his hand against me again and again all day long. He has made my skin and flesh grow old. He has broken my bones. He has besieged me and surrounded me with anguish and distress, buried me in a dark place like those long dead.

This man is at the bottom, finally reached the bottom. You've been there. I've been there.

On previous occasions, we've all been there. In fact, this is a third chapter of a heartbreaking elegy recorded by Jeremiah, who with his own eyes sees and with his own hand writes of all this that is happening around him. I don't know what version of the Bible you're using.

As I said earlier, you're using the New Living Translation. And get this, on 17, 18 occasions, verse after verse after verse begins with, he has, he has, he has, he has, he has, meaning God has, God has. Jeremiah is driving home the point. We've reached the end.

Just a few. He has led me into darkness. He has turned his hand against me.

He has made my skin and flesh grow old. He has broken my bones. He has besieged me and surrounded me with anguish. He has buried me in a dark place. He has walled me in. He has bound me in heavy chains. He has shut out my prayers. He has blocked my way. He has made my road crooked. He is hidden like a bear or a lion. He has dragged me off the path, on and on and on.

He has, he has, he has, he has. I know, I know. He gets monotonous. Anguish gets monotonous.

Heartbreaks get monotonous. And let me tell you the dangerous part of it all. If we're not careful, we begin to entertain alien thoughts. Please hear me. Unlike Jeremiah's audience, please heed.

Hear and heed my words. When all of this begins to happen, you move into a realm of hopelessness. It's a dangerous place to be. I call it dangerous because that is where our adversary loves for us to be. He loves it when you lose hope. He loves it when a preacher loses hope. He applauds when he hears us saying things like, I've hit bottom because he knows at that point it is easy to make satanic choices. It is easy when we are at the bottom to have alien thoughts and come to wrong solutions and begin to feel fear that makes us want to hide and panic that makes us want to run.

And I'm going to go ahead and say it. And to put an end to our lives, which is the adversary's desire for every one of us, never doubt it. He wants you to take your life. What makes it interesting is that those who do are invariably alone. There are not group suicides, not that often, maybe in cults, but not that often. Usually an individual has wound up narrowing life and narrowing it, narrowing it until self-pity takes charge, and now in this hourglass tiny squeeze, he's alone. And that's when the thought hits.

It's my only out. And it's heartbreaking. Some of you have lived through it with a loved one, and you're left with this dreadful reality that she took her life, or he did. Let me back off from that, take a little breath here, and say a further word about self-pity, because that leads to it. I turn to my friend David Roper, who has written a burden-shared, fine little book. From it, I have found these words. Listen to Roper. To resist the pain is to miss the purpose of it.

Right away, there's a lot of wisdom there. We want to run from pain. Wait, wait, wait. To resist pain is to miss the purpose of it. We must not feel sorry for ourselves. He goes on, self-pity is deadly and demonic.

It's the evil one's way of stalling us into introspection and inertia. There is no place for giving up. Suffering isn't fatal. Our eternal destiny isn't riding on our circumstances. I love that line.

Or on what people do or say. Our security is not based upon any of that. It's based upon our Lord's acceptance and His Word. Someday our Lord will return to gather us in and heal us once and for all of all our terrible wounds. In the meantime, we must not waste our pain.

I get this closing line. Suffering promotes counsel we could not otherwise give. And messages we could not otherwise deliver. Had I never known pain, I would have no message for you today. Had I succumbed to pain and taken my own life, you would not have anyone here today to speak.

You would have someone, you wouldn't have me. But from the pain of my past, and it certainly is not as deep as many, I acknowledge that. But it's been deep at times. God has given a message.

He's given counsel. And there may be some wisdom in it that came from the pain. Because I didn't succumb to self-pity. I lived through it, and I said to the Lord, guide me. Use this pain to give me insights I would not otherwise have.

And it isn't me. It's anyone who goes through times of pain. Roper ends with a very moving bit of verse.

Listen closely. Life is not as idle or, but iron dug from central gloom. And heated hot with burning fears and dipped in baths of hissing tears.

And battered by the shocks of doom to shape and to use. A profound statement. Jeremiah offers a far better option than self-pity, I'm pleased to say. When you hit bottom, you remember something important. If you're going to pull out of the self-pity, Jeremiah is our model.

He does that very thing. Look, if you will, beginning at verse 19, and concentrate, okay? Let's all concentrate.

The thought of my suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words. So he's at the bottom, admittedly. He has no place to look but up.

And look at what he does. He looks up. I will never forget this awful time as I grieve over my loss, yet I still dare to hope. Love those words in verse 21. I still dare to hope. And at the bottom, I've come to the pit of my life.

Devastation is all around me, I dare to hope. When? When I remember this. Okay, men and women, this is what we remember when we come to the bottom. Verse 22, I remember the Lord's loving kindness never ends. This is a tough place to hit pause on this message from Chuck Swindoll. Jeremiah has come to a point of despair.

And I'm supposing many who hear these words today can identify with hopeless moments when nothing seems to adequately express our anguish other than the tears we shed. You're listening to Insight for Living, and Chuck titled today's message, What to Remember When You Hit Bottom. And I'll urge you to listen again next time as Jeremiah's story unfolds. If you missed any portion of Chuck's teaching, remember you can listen to previous programs at insightworld.org or download our app to your mobile device. In light of today's heavy subject, let me point you to an uplifting book Chuck's written. It will remind you that the Lord's loving kindness never ends. It's called Encourage Me, Caring Words for Heavy Hearts.

This book from Chuck contains two parts. The first section is for those who need encouragement, and the second part urges us to be encouragers. And to purchase a copy of Encourage Me by Chuck Swindoll, go to insight.org slash offer. Remember that when you give voluntary donations to Insight for Living Ministries, you're becoming an extension of His grace to people around the world who desperately need encouragement.

While churches have been required to curtail their public services, this daily program has continued without interruption. And in fact, we're reaching more listeners than ever before as people access Chuck's teaching through radio, the web, our mobile app, the daily podcast, through their smart speakers and the many convenient ways you can hear Insight for Living. It's all made possible because of our faithful monthly companions and all who give one-time contributions. To give a donation today, call us. If you're listening in the United States, dial 1-800-772-8888, or you can give online by going to insight.org slash donate. Join us again tomorrow when Chuck Swindoll describes what to remember when you hit bottom. Right here on Insight for Living.